Reader's Digest: June 21, 2025

A recent essay by Raymond Guess connects Alasdair MacIntyre with the social history of analytic philosophy.¹ Geuss is a brilliant writer and as trenchant as ever, but I wish he hadn’t opened with the false cliché that from “the start of the 20th century … philosophy would be essentially devoted to the analysis of language, the construction of formal arguments and the solution of logical puzzles”—which erases his own work along with much of the last fifty years of “analytic” philosophy, and was never exactly true to begin with.

Still, I like his observation that “[MacIntyre’s] thought had a kind of archaic substantiality.” And I was intrigued, if not persuaded, by a central plank of his diagnosis, which has to do with MacIntyre’s investment in narrative fiction:

This view of the centrality of literature (that is, of the novel) was something MacInytre and Rorty shared, despite their differences on other issues. It was also part of the reason why many anglophone philosophers reacted so nega…